Moving Forward

• The Mess is over. The dean said he's going to accept the recommendations of the P&T committee; my record is cleared. Finally, forever and done.
• The faculty voted me Emerita status, which makes me absurdly happy. Going out with my head held high and honored by my colleagues. Battered, bruised but whole and redeemed.
• Am currently in Seattle. This is the region I'm moving to in the fall, and I wanted to make sure it was a good thing before committing. I am now not only completely committed, but under contract for a new house! I am seriously in love with my new town - Sequim (pron. Skwim) WA - and my new house. Stopped total strangers on the streets, talked to anybody/everybody we could. One and all said they really love the place and recommend it highly. It's on a bunch of 'best places to retire' lists, and housing prices are reflecting that. I had to pay more than I wanted to, but I'm very pleased with the house, the area and even my new neighbors! My builder is proving very easy to work with and amenable to changes, the house is actually bigger than the one I'm currently living in in Unnamed City and much better insulated. I am thrilled.
• I am so ready to move forward. Classes end the first week of May, and I'll be finished as soon as I turn in grades. Then a summer of travel and fun before moving in August. As quickly as I can in August, because I really want to get up here permanently.
• I feel really good about all of this. Profoundly lucky and fortunate to be able to do it. Very very grateful.

The Committee Has Spoken

The Mess has entered the final phase - hopefully. The P&T Committee sent me a copy of their recommendation to the dean, that I be retained as a professor. They noted that the portfolio was light on evidence as it covered only two years rather than the normal 6. Actually, that tells me that they didn't really read the narrative portion, which explained that it actually only covered a single year and a wildly atypical year at that.

However. The bottom line was that they saw no reason for the portfolio (which tells me that no, indeed, the Dean did not explain why I'd submitted the damned thing) or to change the prior evaluation of my work (which was a rating of "exemplary").  Now it is all in the Dean's lap.

In the final term of my career at Un-named University, I have done something I can't remember ever doing before: I have gone two weeks in the middle of the term without a single class. Two weeks ago, the university closed the campus for weather on Monday, and Tuesday I left for Major Conference. I arranged for the classes to see some films while I was gone. Then last Monday, I cancelled class because I was very ill with a cough that rattles my toes (yes, present tense, the cough persists); then UU cancelled classes anyway. Tuesday-Friday, I got up every day and discovered that the cough was simply too awful to subject anyone else - even though the doctors said I wasn't contagious, I didn't want to risk it. Not to mention that every time I tried to speak or walk and breathe I started coughing again. Bottom line, if I can get in tomorrow without dislodging a lung, it'll be the first time in two weeks that I've met with a class.

Which means that I can either pretend everything is on schedule, or change the schedule in the hope/plan that I'll miss no more classes. Luckily, I don't do content-focused classes - I don't have to 'get through the Cold War' events, although I will get the concepts, issues, trends and questions. Because those aren't event-centered, but process-centered.

UU's leadership has pretty well destroyed my loyalty to the institution; my students and my friends are what I will focus on in these last weeks.